Review on PG Dating Admin Panel | By: wiseguy

This dating software review will talk about the Admin Panel of PG Dating. For this PG Dating review we’ll be using the Admin Panel demo from the official site of the company. The demo is located over here:

The demo admin username and password are already in their places. After the login the following page will appear:

So. What we can see here. On the left site, as always we can see the menu items. On the right side we can see some kind of statistics of the site, the payment system and blog posts (?). Do not completely understand why it was needed to show blog posts in the admin panel dashboard. Maybe would be better to show there the content awaiting for the approval? After logging in all the admins will need to approve the content first – photos, videos, essays, for example. And not read blog posts like it is done in PG Dating. Also there’s a graph there which is supposed to show some statistics in graphical format, however… it doesn’t…

I’ve made a wider screen capture so you can see that although the admin language is chosen English, the graph is shown in a different language, supposedly it is Russian. Hmm… Not so professional to show half of the content in a different language than the chosen one.

I’ve just started writing this PG Dating review but I already start to dislike this script. But let’s dig further and examine the other sections of the admin panel.

Users Management

This is the first section of the menus in PG Dating admin panel. This section is intended to manage the users of the site, groups, payment settings and the uploads (files, uploaded by the site users). Let’s see some of them.

Here you can see the list of the users of the site, can edit their data or delete it. Ok. Take a look at the top of the page where it says how many users the site has.

And now let’s see the total users in the list shown on that web-site. I’ll show the bottom of the page so you can see the exact number:

Well. As you can see, there are 24 registered users while the system says there are 22 users. It can’t even count correctly?

Add user

I don’t completely understand the need of this feature in admin panel. What is this feature for? To add fake users? They’ve created a dedicated feature just to add fakes? I supposes anybody will be able to add new users simply registering them as ordinary users do. There was no need to create a feature in admin panel just to add users. Here you can see that the section is just like the ordinary registration:

Uploads approve

This is the section to approve the uploaded content, if you chose to approve them before they’re shown on the web-site. However, since we’re testing the demo site, the list is empty. At least they should some default content there, so we could see how it is being done. For example, is there a preview of the video or music files, etc. It remains secret for us.

Uploads settings

This is the section to change the settings of the files to be uploaded. See the screen capture first:

As you can see, PG Dating developers shown the size in kilobytes but didn’t mention anything about the width and height. In what measure units are those values? Pixels, picas, points, millimeters, or maybe centimeters? Not user friendly to mention the measurement in one place and not mention in another. Let’s continue this dating software review and proceed to the next section of PG Dating admin panel.

This is the section of PG Dating admin panel to edit the content of the site. Here you can edit the News, delete them, add RSS feeds to load content from other sites, manage the reference lists, banners, bad words, Ecards, etc.

Didn’t find anything interesting in those areas. I can say just one thing that there are too many areas and submenus there which can seem too complicated for some users. A lot of submenus could be combined in one submenu, in order to be more user friendly.

This is the section for the main settings of the site. Let’s see the submenus for better understanding.

Admin settings

This is the section to manage Admin settings. For default it shows the section to change the site e-mail. I can see here a submenu with name “Database Management”. Let’s open it.

Well. Can anybody tell me why it is needed to allow the change of the database connection settings through the admin panel? When you change the database, your site, including the admin panel will be down until you put the correct database settings. But why do PG Dating developers need to create such a section in admin panel when it will not be possible to access that section and change the data in case you’ve changed the database or your old database was damaged? Besides of it, if you’re not a technical user and don’t know much in such stuff, you’ll simply make changes there and get your site down as it will not be able to connect to the database. That’s sad. This is not the first time when I see an unprofessionally created solution, but each time I feel sad for those customers which will purchase such scripts and have problems because of usability lacks and too complicated features which could be avoided in admin panel.

Languages

I’ve noticed that there’s a section to manage the languages, add new languages and make changes in the existing language file(s). So, let’s see how it is done.

OK. So, we see that this is showing just the language file, like a simple text editor. Would be much better to show it in the form of fields, in order not to make mess and not to brake anything. For example, if you accidently delete there a comma or any other symbol, a single one, your site will be broken and will not work until you log into your FTP and correct the deleted symbol or upload the affected language file. This is not user friendly and will cause a lot of problems for non-technical users. They could even avoid to create such a section in admin panel if it would be so complicated. In such a form you can edit the language file even if you don’t have such a section there, simply entering the server through FTP and editing the needed file.

And finally, the last section to talk about in this dating software review.

This section lists all the features of the site with their own submenus. Let’s examine a couple of them and see what can be done.

Flash Chat

This is the section to manage the Flash Chat. You’ll wonder, why I’ve chosen especially this section. That’s because I see there a submenu with name “Messages”:

Wow. They allow the admin to read the messages written by the users of the site! As you know, it’s absolutely illegal to read the users’ messages as everybody has a right to have private conversations and nobody has a right to read those messages. This is a dating site software and this feature changes everything. Your users will leave your site if they find out that you’ll be reading what they say. That’s the same as somebody listens your phone conversation with your girlfriend.

And another submenu here is the “Newsletter” feature. I’ve chosen to create a new Newsletter using a WYSIWYG editor. Here’s PG Dating’s WYSIWYG editor :D

Heh. You all surely know that this is not a WYSIWYG editor, this is just a textbox. In WYSIWYG editors you will find a lot of formatting tools, image insert tools, etc. However here we can just see a simple text field while it is stated to be a WYSIWYG editor. Too bad ladies and gentlemen… That’s all.
/p